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Horror story of Pakistani minorities
THE HORROR STORY OF PAKISTAN'S MINORITIES
By: Saradindu Mukherji
Times of India, March 14, 1995
The acquittal of a 14-year old Christian boy and his uncle by the Lahore
high court in the so-called blasphemy case establishes not only that the
minorities in Pakistan are an endengered species but also that their safety
is dependent entirely on international pressure.
While it is understandable the the West should have taken so long to
realise the grim insecurity of the miniscule Christian minority in Pakistan,
there is little justification for the apathy of the political class in India,
which includes a very vibrant intelligentsia in this matter. The 1991 census
revealed that the minorities - Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis and Ahmadiyas-
who formed 23 % of the population of West Pakistan at the time of Partition
have been reduced to around 3%. If this is not ethnic cleansing, what it is?
While a sizable section of the minorties was wiped out in partition-
related mayhem, state-sponsored pogroms and forced conversions, the rest
had to abandon their ancestral homes and seek refuge in India. The Hindus
and Christians, numbering 1.2 million each, are mainly concentrated in
Sindh, where the bulk of the Hindus live, most of them work as bonded
labourers in lands owned by the Muslims; in Punjab, the Christians are
generally employed in low-paid jobs. This microscopic minority of kafirs
has suffered every conceivable form of intimidation, harassment, discrimi-
nation and persecution in the years since partition.
We should not forget that Pakistan emerged out of the rabid hatred
for the kafirs, which concretised with the street violence in Calcutta
on August, 1946, observed as "direct action day". As Sir Francis Wylie,
the governor of UP, wrote to the viceroy on August 29, 1946: "the most
ominous feature of the (Muslim League) demonstrations was the notable
tendency to give the whole movement a religious flavour. Many of the
meetings took place in and around mosques just after the usual Friday
prayers. I am told too that members of the Muslim League party are
making vigorous efforts to obtain support of Maulvis and Immams every-
where in the province. You might have noticed that The Dawn recently
started quoting extracts from the Quran every day on its leader page.
There has been some shouting of slogans about "Jehad" in various towns here."
Documents available with the Public Record Office (equivalent to our
National Archives) in London further substantiate the theory that
Pakistan was especially created for the Muslims. The British High
Commissioner to Pakistan, in his secret despatch to the Whitehall, dated
5th May 1948 wrote, "What Jinnah appears to be aiming at is a state
sufficiently Islamic on a high level to make it acceptable to the
brotherhood of Islamic states." To understand the plight of the Masihs
in Pakistan as well as the humiliation heaped on the Hindus and other
minorities there, it is crucial that we do not lose sight of the
lineage of the Pakistan state. But then India is full of lobbyists
for Pakistan and admirers of Jinnah who are also engaged in the lofty
mission of rehabilitating his "sacred" memory.
One of the most discriminatory and humiliating devices to reduce the
non-Muslims to a status lower than that of second-class citizens is the
separate electoral system, which bars minorities from active participation
in national politics. The minorities vote in separate lists and can only
be elected from special lists for the national and provincial Assemblies.
Unlike Muslim candidates, minority politicians cannot choose their
constituencies. The entire country is their constituency. Thus a Pakistani
Hindu cannot vote for a Muslim politician any more than a Muslim can
vote for a non-Muslim candidate. In the 237-member national assembly, the
kafirs have only ten representatives and they are barred from the Upper
House. This is religious apartheid at its crudest.
In a juridical dispute, the Muslim can accuse a non-Muslim of being
a 'kafir', in such a case the testimony of the latter would count for
half that of a Muslim's. In the event of homicide (voluntary or involunatry)
the kith and kin of a non-Muslim victim are entitled to only half the
compensation foreseen for a Muslim victim in a parallel case. There are
numerous other ways of persecuting the non-Muslims. Should a Muslim abduct
a non-Muslim woman (even a married woman) and declare that she has embraced
Islam, her family loses all legal power to claim her freedom. The quota
system and inherent religious prejudice have combined in such a way that
the non-Muslims are grossly discriminated in matters of education and
employment opportunities. No wonder most of them are engaged in low-level
sanitary work or in the nursing profession to which the "believers" are
not attracted. Moreover, Islamiyat is a compulsory subject for all students.
Theoretically, a non-Muslim can refuse to be examined on Islamiyat in the
absence of an alternative subject, the student stands to forfeit the marks
allotted to the subject.
In public schools there is no provision for teaching any religion other
than Islam. Non-Muslims also find it difficult to get admission to a
public hospital or to get a blood transfusion. This is not all though. In
1992, the Pakistani authorities made it mandatory for the people to declare
their religions in national identity cards. This is generally seen as another
tactic to isolate the non-Muslims and create a system of Islamic apartheid.
As if all this was not enough to reinforce the minority status of the
kafirs, other methods are also adopted to subjugate them - desecrating
their places of worship, forcibly converting and abducting them etc. No
wonder, there is a steady flow of Hindus from Sindh to India. Despite this
overwhelming evidence, the political class in India including some of the
refugee-victims of partition, habitually goes out of its way to defend
Pakistan. A whole range of diplomatic reports from Pakistan such as the
US state department Human Rights reports and the reports of some Pakistani
human rights activists stand as testimony to the victimisation of non-
Muslims. But we the people, and the government have refused to be moved
by these accounts.
We must see Pakistan as it is - a fundamentalist-terrorist state, no
matter whether it is ruled by a London-trained barrister, s Sandhurst
cadet, a feudal chieftain or an Oxford graduate. The ideological sustenance
flows from the same source.
If The Economist, The Times, Newsweek and the chain of the prestigious
media and other organisations in the West could highlight the plight of
the Masihs and provide the necessary moral pressure, why can't we follow
suit.
